David Johnson

Principal Consultant – Technology & Operations Leadership

Tech Lift Ventures LLC

Jan 2025 - Current (1 year 8 months)

• Provide fractional engineering leadership and consulting to growth-stage SaaS and tech-enabled companies on engineering delivery, release management, QA strategy, and platform operations. • Partner with executive teams on technical due diligence, organizational design, delivery cadence, and operating-rhythm improvements. • Architect AI-augmented product workflows leveraging Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for MRD / PRD authoring, prototype acceleration, and team productivity. • Implement operating systems (CRM, BI dashboards, executive reporting) for growth-stage businesses scaling toward $10M+ revenue targets.

Head of Product & Engineering

Nuqleous

Jan 2024 - Dec 2024 (1 year)

• Led 25-person cross-functional organization across Product Management, Software Engineering, QA, and Cloud Operations for retail analytics SaaS products (Spotlight Retail Analytics, Shelf IQ Category Management) integrating Walmart Luminate, Target BPD / Greenfield, and Amazon data ecosystems. • Built the company’s first structured product management discipline and 12-month roadmap; established OKRs tied to product milestones, acquisition goals, and engineering rigor. • Led technical due diligence and post-acquisition integration planning that contributed to 66% revenue growth. • Standardized Agile workflows in 30 days: migrated all teams to Jira, instituted two-week sprint cadence, daily scrums, and retrospectives. • Deployed monitoring

Head of Engineering

Qrypt

Apr 2023 - Jan 2024 (10 months)

• Led 26-person engineering organization spanning Software, Hardware, and Cloud Operations for quantum-safe cybersecurity products. • Owned delivery of cybersecurity services running across proprietary QRNG hardware, private data centers, and Azure infrastructure. • Established operating rhythms, job families, hiring plans, and role clarity across eight engineering functions. • Managed compliance posture against ISO 27001 and NIST standards, including audit readiness and access controls. • Formed Product Advisory Board to improve roadmap prioritization and stakeholder alignment. Environment: Azure, Rust, C++, PHP, private data centers, proprietary QRNG hardware

VP / Senior Director / Director of Engineering

Visual Lease

Aug 2019 - Apr 2023 (3 years 9 months)

• Progressed through three levels of engineering leadership while scaling the engineering and operations organization from 20 to 62 staff during a SaaS hypergrowth phase. • Maintained 9% voluntary attrition during the “Great Resignation” through deliberate culture-building, career pathing, and organizational design. • Migrated core SaaS platform from private cloud to AWS; built monitoring, provisioning, backup / recovery, and DR capabilities supporting 99.95% production uptime. • Supported ARR growth from $12M to $32M (166%) and customer platform usage growth of 200% through delivery of new lease accounting modules, asset management, the company’s first public REST API, a modernized Angular UI, and embedded BI / reporting capabilities. • Re

Senior Director of IT Operations & Managed Hosting

WorkWave

May 2018 - Aug 2019 (1 year 4 months)

• Led cloud hosting, infrastructure automation, and global support engineering for a high-volume field service SaaS platform supporting 1,000+ clients. • Transformed a reactive 3-person operations unit into a proactive 9-person Infrastructure & Operations team owning platform availability, security, and service-desk excellence. • Implemented Infrastructure-as-Code and automated provisioning, reducing manual setup time by 70% and eliminating configuration drift. • Stood up centralized telemetry & observability stack (ELK + Grafana); improved Mean-Time-To-Detection (MTTD) by 60%. • Designed and tested multi-region failover protocols and automated backup verification, achieving 99.9% high availability. • Architected 24 / 7 “follow-the-sun” sup

Director of Quality Assurance Engineering

WorkWave

Mar 2017 - May 2018 (1 year 3 months)

• Led the Quality Engineering function for field service SaaS products; defined end-to-end test strategy across unit, integration, regression, and performance testing. • Standardized delivery tooling: migrated 8 teams to Jira and Confluence (integrated with Salesforce) in 90 days, creating a “paved road” for consistent release processes. • Introduced a modern automated test framework (Selenium / Cucumber / NUnit) that improved CI maturity and accelerated release velocity.

Director of Engineering – Delivery & Quality (Formerly: Foliage-Altran)

Capgemini Engineering

Jan 2015 - Jan 2017 (2 years 1 month)

• Led delivery and quality oversight for regulated software programs in medical device, aerospace, and industrial sectors. • Directed a $5M PET / CT remediation engagement, rapidly hiring and onboarding 30+ engineers within six months. • Implemented hybrid Agile + FDA-aligned quality management practices for compliance-heavy product environments. • Launched offshore engineering delivery model in India to expand consulting capacity.

Director of Engineering - Shared Services (formerly: Memento Security)

FIS

Dec 2011 - Dec 2014 (3 years 1 month)

• Began as QA leader for a bank fraud-detection SaaS platform; expanded scope to own Customer Support, Sustaining Engineering, Release Management, IT / Security Compliance, and Product Documentation. • Introduced an iterative testing approach that enabled more frequent, higher-quality releases of the fraud-detection solution. • Defined and enforced Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for priority-based defect resolution, improving responsiveness for internal and external stakeholders. • Built and managed a distributed cross-functional team across multiple shared-service functions; owned compliance audits and customer-facing release communications.

Senior Manager of Quality Assurance (Formerly: Kronos, Inc.)

UKG

Nov 2010 - Dec 2011 (1 year 2 months)

• Led Delivery of end-to-end features and services through project management of a cross-functional delivery team using Scrum practices • Responsible for team of 17 Software Quality engineers, and owning the Quality strategy and results for multiple software and hardware products.

Director of Engineering – Quality Assurance

Certeon

May 2008 - Nov 2010 (2 years 7 months)

• Grew the Software QA team from 2 to 9 team members. • Defined a rigorous end-to-end test strategy, and spearheaded an automated test framework that included continuous functional and performance testing of (WAN) performance optimization products. • Collaborated with Product Management to curate a Product Roadmap and a repeatable Agile process.

Director of Engineering - Software Quality Assurance

iconectiv

May 2006 - May 2008 (2 years 1 month)

• Responsible for 24 Software QA Engineers (US & Ukraine) performing comprehensive manual and automated testing on industry-leading telecommunication operational support products. • Received Telcordia Technologies CEO Award for my role in a successful Latin-America Product Launch.

Lead Software QA Engineer

iconectiv

Nov 1998 - Apr 2006 (7 years 6 months)

• As a Lead Software QA Engineer, was responsible for integration testing “NCON” inventory management and service activation product with 3rd party telecom equipment vendors (Switches, DSLAMs, Routers). • Received Telcordia Technologies CEO Award for my role in a successful Latin-America Product Launch.

Electronic Warfare Systems Specialist

US Air Force

Sep 1989 - Oct 1992 (3 years 2 months)

U.S. Air Force - 363 Tactical Fighter Wing, Shaw Air Force, Base, SC Responsible for analyzing systems and repairing any found malfunctions, Special Operations Forces/Personnel Recovery Integrated Electronic Warfare Systems specialists ensure that pilots are always able to detect the threats and risks present while on their missions. These experts utilize a variety of systems and methods to make certain that every system is working exactly as it should when it takes to the air. Deployed to the theater of operations of Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm, was awarded: US National Defense Medal | Kuwait Liberation Medal | US Air Force Achievement Medal Recipient of the Air Force, "Below the Zone" early promotion program Secret Security

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